Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday May 09, 2009 @10:53PM
from the bend-over-backwards-and-insert-here dept.

unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica piece detailing the convoluted lengths to which the MPAA will go in order to keep anybody from ripping a DVD, ever. The organization showed a film to the US Copyright Office, in the triennial hearing to spell out exemptions to the DMCA, giving instructions for how a teacher could use a camcorder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for educational use — even though such a purpose is solidly established in law as fair use. "Never mind that this solution results in video of questionable quality and requires teachers to learn even more tech in order to get the job done. It also requires schools (or, given the way most schools are run, the teachers themselves) to incur additional costs to purchase camcorders and videotapes if they don't have them already. Add in the extra time involved, and this 'solution' is a laughably convoluted alternative to simply ripping a clip from a DVD."

You do realize that is because of blue-ray right? The Vista DRM is necessary in order to comply with the blue ray specs and HDCP which requires end to end Drive to display hardware/software copy protection.

That is why i am glad apple and linux doesn't have blue ray in there stuff. Teachers should be able to use clips of dvd's and other media for teaching. DRM is preventing that.

Given the technology skills most my teachers have had I can see them trying to put the dvd inside a photocopier and hoping for the best. Your average teacher couldn't rip a DVD, and why bother when you can just get any notable clip you want off youtube. Go fight with Google MPAA.

Putting aside the fact that almost every teacher I have or have had in highschool with the exception of a few have been able to rip video clips off dvds, and the ones who couldn't would simply have student who was bright enough do it for them. Most schools/districts these days block youtube as well as facebook, myspace, etc, for reasons unknown as it seems to only serve the purpose of annoying teachers and students. Wonderful fun, our district also chooses to block many useful linux/programming sites as t

Reasons unknown? If my boss blocked Facebook and YouTube fewer idiots would be wasting time they should be spending doing billable work for our clients. The schools' blocking open source sites for fear of hacking is disappointing, but your suggestion that social networking and flash video websites serve some useful purpose is ridiculous. I wish you luck getting programming and open source sites to kids, but try leave pointless time-wasters out of your argument when defending your suggestion in front of t

I disagree with your assertion that Youtube videos can't be educationally relevant. Try getting the equipment to actually have students go outside and observe the sun in a high school. Then try checking out these clips:

And I defy you to find a school where their library is as well-stocked with information on diverse subjects as the internet. Most school libraries have vast sections of Juvenille literature, and are so small that the Dewey Decimal system is still relevant and useful to them. The librarian is more likely to point the students to the internet, because the source material one can get from a good google search or series of searches is far more timely, more likely to be relevant, and much quicker to access.

I really think you actually need to do some research about the educational uses of the Internet before spouting off the opinion that video is a pointless time-waster and that books are the only real source of useful information.

People will always be able to rip DVDs. It doesn't matter if the law allows the circumvention or not, it's a cracked technology.

However, if the law DOES allow it, that opens the door for legitimate businesses to manufacture and sell tools to make it easy for educators to copy clips. That's one of the reasons why it's so important that it be legal.

People will always be able to rip DVDs. It doesn't matter if the law allows the circumvention or not, it's a cracked technology.

However, if the law DOES allow it, that opens the door for legitimate businesses to manufacture and sell tools to make it easy for educators to copy clips. That's one of the reasons why it's so important that it be legal.

And there's the, admittedly, side issue of the minority users who still theoretically cannot watch DVDs because of the structure of the market.Of course even if I did get a great DVD player with my Linux distribution of choice, I'd probably still go with a native hacked player because the dvdnav lib skips a few "mandatory" bits like forced displays (no you cannot skip forward or to the menu from here) and so on.

Teachers may also make partial copies of a CD for education purposes by recording to a vinyl record and playing it back on a phonograph.

It appears that part of the rationale behind the MPAA doing this is:1) To keep any copies (copied fair-use clips, no less) of marginal quality so as to increase the (theoretical) value of an actual DVD. Dubious logic here, if that is part of the reasoning. If that were the case they could more logically argue to keep low quality copies (in general) of MPAA IP legal for educational purposes, no matter how it is derived (from ripping software or through cam-cording).2) Try and prevent the spread of DVD-circumvention devices. Dubious logic again since it would probably be more efficient to by an extra DVD (or use the original if possible) and just bookmark the appropriate scenes for classroom viewing rather than to buy blank tape and maintain video equipment. Of course you can't un-invent DeCSS, nor can the MPAA go back in time and assassinate DVD Jon or people like him, so trying to stop DVD copying is fruitless and will only punish people and hinder schools, etc from making back-ups, fair-use clips, etc. The logic here is as senseless as the people who want to fight the War on Drugs.3) They've already argued against cam-cording in non-educational settings (like movie-theaters), so it seems like they just have too much time and money on there hands and just want to be difficult. These are people who have power, and want to get as much out of it as they can. They seem to be enjoying themselves. My two cents here.

Ahem. You seem to have that bass-ackwards. Top quality cassette tape is superior to top quality vinyl - AND much cheaper. Vinyl is played back with one single needle, while a good cassette recorder/player has multiple heads. Even my ancient reel-to-reel had multiple heads. (5 I think, maybe 7 - but I'm not digging it out just to check) Perhaps you meant to compare vinyl to 8-track. Those 8-tracks were a pile of pig shit, which is why I never owned one.

Standard audio cassette tape travels at 1 7/8 ips (inches of tape per second past the heads) and is complete and total SHIT. No amount of DBS/Dolby "magic" and expensive playback electronics can fix that. Audio cassettes have the lowest fidelity of any analog format in history and only the mega-stoned could tolerate listening to them. 8-tracks ran at 3 3/4 ips. Twice as fast. That means twice the headroom, twice the high frequency information, and half the tape noise. Consumer reel-to-reel ran at 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips for another doubling of quality. Semi-pro machines ran at 7 1/2 and 15 ips. Pro machines ran at 15 and 30 ips. (at $200 per reel for 2" multitrack tape, studios didn't run at 30ips much, usually just for jazz and classical)

The number of heads above 3 had fuck-all to do with anything. Having separate heads for playback, recording, and erase allowed the magnetic gap to be optimized for a single task. Cassettes were 2-sided and expensive decks often had more heads but only so you didn't have to flip the tape or move the heads to play the other side. It was still a $100 saddle on a $10 horse.

Cassette tape is so insanely inferior to vinyl that I won't even dignify your comparison by responding. I'm guessing your only experience with a turntable involved mangled children's records on a battery-operated "record player" adorned with Disney characters.

And publicly reproduce their works, or create a derivative work?? Nonono, if RIAA and MPAA had their way, you wouldn't be able to sing along listening to your CD's outside the house because that is public reproduction, or even talk during dinner about the movie you just saw with your date, because that is a derivative work!

I'm glad for ridiculous crap like this, because the more groups that end up on the target list of the MAFIAA's tactics, the sooner something will be done to redress the abuses of our society and our freedoms they have perpetuated in the name of copyright.

People apparently have to feel the heat themselves in order to see the wrong in the MAFIAA's ways.

OTOH I do not see why teachers would be an exception. They should teaching us stuff, including what is right and what is wrong. Where did I do my first copyright violations? Yep, many many years before the Internet was available. I did it by making copies of books.

Not only did I do that, my teacher told me to do so. Even then I knew something wrong was going on, as the first copy I was sure to make was the copyright notice. I thought it was pretty ironic. I also t

In some countries, it is extremely difficult to fire a bad teacher...So you give a bad teacher a really good reference and hope they will get hired somewhere else, usually to a more senior position which pays more money so they have incentive to go. Also in a position with more power they are likely to do less actual teaching.

A good teacher on the other hand, will be held onto by the school and kept where they provide the most value - teaching, without giving them additional responsibility that would take a

Sorry about double-posting, but I just remembered something else: how would the teacher's union react to this? I'm not very fond of unions, but this time it would be a good thing to have on our side. The teachers union holds quite a bit of clout in government and they probably wouldn't put up with BS like this. Their argument would probably be something along the lines of that teachers are [rightfully] too busy to waste their time recording movies with a camcorder just to please the movie industry. The MPAA would probably back down even if they got their way and then had to take on the unions.

Actually, I suspect that their argument would be far simpler: current American copyright law contains a specific exemption for limited copying for educational purposes. The MPAA can complain all it wants, but the law is on our side.

Experiment: Take a random sample of teachers. Equip half with camcorders, a DVD, DVD player and TV. (For completeness, include a group that can take a feed from the DVD player directly to the camcorder). Equip the other half with a PC, DVD ripping software, a DVD and DVD player.

Measure the time taken to extract a clip from the specific DVD and the quality achieved by each group. Compare results.

Hypothesis: Quality obtained by first group will be acceptable and is a lower-tech solution than that need

"10 points extra credit to whoever helps me clip this section of this movie off this DVD."

Can guarentee in any school where teachers are actually concerned about pulling clips off a DVD at least 5 students will know how to do that right then and there.

Camcorder method requires setting up the camcorder, TV or projector, lighting, you'll likely need to do this in a spare room or after hours. Then you have to edit it in to whatever the teacher wanted to use it fo

Don't forget to add in the extra MONETARY COST of owning and maintaining all the extra equipment necessary for doing things the mafiaa approved way. Our school disctrict alone might spend $10,000 annually to keep this obsolete equipment around, pointlessly. It costs just about $0.00 to just rip content on a ten year old computer.

The direct feed is unlikely to work...They usually use some kind of copy protection scheme from macrovision that exploits a bug in old VHS recorders... Although this bug has long since been fixed, VHS manufacturers have been forced to intentionally reintroduce it so their recorders cannot bypass the copy protection scheme.

I was one of the few people that had the pleasure (or the displeasure) of being at the Library of Congress DMCA hearing room when the MPAA made this ridiculous argument. Suffice to say, I was completely shocked, flabbergasted, and just plain insulted that educators would truly be expected to do something like this in their bizarro world. Nevermind the fact that you would need an HDTV, HD Camcorder, Tripod, good lighting, and tons of time on your hands to manually create compilation clips with your camcorder (as if educators had any free time as it is).

I couldn't tell if the Copyright bigwigs that heard the argument were actually taking it seriously, but I sincerely hope that any appearance of sincerity was simply there for the sake of keeping respect for the hearings.

The one thing that I learned at the hearing was that you have to be fucking crazy in order to be a lawyer on their side. Even I (a soon to be unemployed law school graduate) didn't think that I could make this argument with a straight face even for tons of money.

Even I (a soon to be unemployed law school graduate) didn't think that I could make this argument with a straight face even for tons of money.

Some people are great lawyers for a reason - they can distance themselves from logic and common sense and still present a case, so long as the price is right. Having said that, I'm not I'd want to have anything to do with them on a personal basis, as I feel their humanity would have been sucked out by the profession.

I don't really have sympathy, but I understand the mess they're being confronted with. If they admit that it should be legal to break DRM in cases of fair use, then the DRM-breaking tools themselves will have to be legal. Then suddenly they have no ground to control the distribution of DRM-breaking tools, which means everyone will have them, which means DRM will be completely useless.

Now there's a good argument that those things should happen, but it's pretty clear that the MPAA doesn't want that to happ

I am more than willing to support smarter teachers in the classroom, including paying higher taxes for higher pay for these teachers. Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?!
Maybe if the MPAA had smarter teachers in the classroom when they were in school they would never try to pull fast ones like this to the Copyright office in the first place!

I know that its legitimate in Russia to break copy protection to make a backup as allowed under their law. I don't think that is allowed in the states because it would be effectively attacking the DRM scheme. That makes it kinda silly then to have fair use and not allow people to use that right. Points to how poorly crafted the DMCA really is.

What do these folks have against education?First they go after the students, now, they go after the teachers?

This brings up another point that someone further up mentioned as a joke, I've always thought that using a camcorder to record a movie would be and/or should be fair use, Its obviously an inferior copy (even the best shaky cams have some serious problems, mostly they point out just how $h!tty the theatre experience is, people get up, down, coughing, talking, etc); when it comes down to it I suspect t

Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.

Time to put an end to chucklehead organizations like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA. Companies are trying to be heavy-handed with their customers while letting some vaporous organization take the heat for their dickish behavior. Implement joint and several liability on the member companies for the actions of their enforcement organizations and this silly business will end overnight.

The problem with most copyright arguments is that it tends to support downloading. If one is going to use the analog hole to break copyright, them one might as well download a copy from the internet. This accomplishing the same thing, that is make a fair use copy of the video without breaking the copy protection.

Realistically, given the increasing free market bias of the developed world, combined with the relaxed view of copyright in the developing world, companies either have to supply content in a use

If you watch the History channels very, very early in the morning, you'll find that they run a show with less/no commercials to make room before the top of the hour. During that time, they have a History Classroom or something show (seriously - that's not my best time of day, so I apologize for inaccuracies).

One thing I noticed - there's a screen that gives instructions to teachers that they have to delete any video recordings they've made of the show after a certain date - I recall, sleepily - that it's within a year or something.

Now - how does history go stale in a year?

I did a lot of digging to find the food chain on this one... History is the Classroom ties into Cable in the Classroom. Here's what they have to say:

Now, color me naive - but that's the beginning of the foodchain for a teacher to BEGIN to simply videotape something related to history of educational value to show to their students. I quote - and I am not making this up:

In an age where our test scores show we're failing, with teachers overburdened like never before - related to a show that a kid can just watch at home without encumbrances (should his/her parents **be there** for the kid with this kind of info) - note what the teacher has to go through.

As opposed to just taping it and working it into the lesson plan - because it comes from a place called the History Channel - tied to Cable in the Classroom - where "cable" is that thing usually subsidized by local communities as a near utility.

We can't have teachers ripping DVD-quality clips all willy-nilly. Why, if someone got ahold of enough teachers, he could put all their clips together and re-create the original movie! In digital DVD quality! You pirates will surely roast in hell for even considering it.

They see their teacher making a copy of a DVD: ''I need to do that because the MPAA says so''. The conclusion that kids will draw is that it is perfectly fine to make copies of DVD and that this is sanctioned by the MPAA.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that the MPAA wants to protect its income stream by getting teachers to train up lots of adults who they can sue. Remember: the MPAA gets money from sueing, the studios loose money through piracy of DVDs.

I just finished ripping my somewhat meager DVD collection (~ 100 titles) to disk. Guess I should start over and use a camcorder this time around...

On a more serious note - this really is getting absurd. Even with good care DVDs get scratched. I had to run a couple of mine through a Skip Doctor before they'd play without errors (as an aside: that's a pretty nifty device). But frankly the "backing up" aspect of all this is secondary - I'm ripping my DVDs because it's a heck of a lot more convenient to manage my library of purchased DVDs this way. Now I can take advantage of some great free software (pyTivo, streambaby) and watch whichever one I want using my Tivo remote - no more digging through the DVD rack looking for one particular movie.

There's just no way I'm going to let these dinosaurs tell me what I can and can't do with my own stuff.

Strictly speaking, at least in the US, there is a significant difference between a "rip" and a "backup". By "rip" it is almost always meant a video file produced by breaking CSS and re-encoding the contents of the DVD. That would fall foul of the DMCA(which sucks; but it is pretty clear).

A "backup" would just be a copy, bit-for-bit of the DVD, which the MPAA and friends obviously don't want you to make, and you would probably get in trouble for distributing; but in no way violates the DMCA. (incidentally, this part is why DVD piracy started well before CSS was broken. Since anybody with a DVD player can decode CSS crippled disks, a pirate simply has to clone the disk, not break the crypto)

Strictly speaking, at least in the US, there is a significant difference between a "rip" and a "backup".

I don't think so. Even Microsoft's Windows Media Player has a large "Rip" button in the middle of its menu, right beside the "Backup" button. "Rip" is to extract audio and/or video (to a hard drive). "Backup" is to burn it. I checked the Wikipedia also, which seems to agree with me.

No, "backup" is to create a second copy for use in case the original is altered or destroyed. You can easily make a backup to your hard drive as a DVD image and that is still a backup. The parent's description is still accurate.

The part I was drawing attention to was you saying that to back something up is to burn it. You do not have to burn the data to a disk for it to be a backup. The poster you were arguing with stating that the difference between "rip" and "backup" was whether or not the data was converted to another format or simply a bit-to-bit copy.

Converting a DVD to another format (ripping) means that you are removing the DRM (which violates the DMCA), but making a bit-to-bit copy (including the original DRM) and savin

A "backup" would just be a copy, bit-for-bit of the DVD, which the MPAA and friends obviously don't want you to make, and you would probably get in trouble for distributing; but in no way violates the DMCA. (incidentally, this part is why DVD piracy started well before CSS was broken. Since anybody with a DVD player can decode CSS crippled disks, a pirate simply has to clone the disk, not break the crypto)

Except that currently available DVD burners don't burn the part of the disk where the keys are stored, so the (encrypted) backup won't play in a DVD player.

The key is written to the disk as regular data, and if you could copy the entire disk it would just work, but the CSS key region is not writable on typical DVD media, nor by typical DVD drives.

If you have the ability to press new DVDs though -- like a commercial pirate might -- you can simply duplicate the disk as-is without decoding or re-encrypted anything. That's how the thing was produced in the first place.

That would fall foul of the DMCA(which sucks; but it is pretty clear).

Bypassing encryption/protection/DRM for the purpose of interoperability is perfectly legal. In this case, the interoperability required is backup software for the fair use copy. Ergo, interoperability issue.:-D

I suggest you try playing a 20 second clip from the middle of a commercial DVD sometime to see how practical it is. Thanks to the inclusion of unskippable logos, trailers and informative films telling you how downloading music is stealing and makes you a criminal, it takes forever to actually get to the content. Whoever came up with the idea of locking DVD player controls should be made to try to start up Toy Story for an audience of 100 impatient toddlers and see how good an idea it seems then.

We could insist that all educational DVD players don't implement these controls, but then that would break the DMCA and we're back to square one.

My policy is, every time I see a "DOWNLOADING IS STEALING" message, you know the sort of thing that comes on at maximum audio volume and that can't be skipped, on a DVD that I legitimately own, the movie industry owes me another movie. Displaying said message is regarded as agreement to these terms.

Sorry LainTouko, still breaking the DMCA with that one so you might as well have an exception to the DMCA. (Much like they are trying to do.)Command line mplayer is probably beyond your average 7th period drama teacher as well.